Russian Literature Now Threatened by Both Censorship and AI, Two Phenomena which Re-Enforce One Another, Literary Critic Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 23 – In 1946, George Orwell wrote in his essay “The Suppression of Literature” that in a totalitarian society of the future, government censorship will be re-enforced by a system in which “machines will write books,” something that is now happening and means that Russian literature is threatened by both censorship and AI, Semyon Vladimirov says.

            Government censorship in the Russian Federation has attracted enormous attention, the Russian literary critic says; but the ways in which AI re-enforces it both in the course of editorial checking when computer algorithms are used and in the writing of books that will slip through the system has not (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/08/23/neiroslop-i-neirotsenzor).

            At least since last year, major Russian publishing houses are using AI to check manuscripts not as elsewhere to ensure that a human wrote them but rather than they will pass muster with the censors, thus helping the latter to restrict the publication of works the officials don’t approve of, Vladimirov says.

            That is insidious enough given how many mistakes such AI surveys involve, confusing something innocent with something that must be banned. But AI is also allowing writers who hope for publication to avoid any mention of something that could get them in trouble, thus helping censorship and leaving literature ever grayer.

            The specific features of the Russian case that Vladimirov points to are important, but his general point is even more so. AI can easily re-enforce impulses to censor especially if it makes it easy for other governments to impose their will via what may appear to many as “objective” computer models.